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Youness, a Bedouin from the Ananza tribe, comes in from the desert with his slaves and a thousand she-camels. His wish is to buy an olive valley on the outskirts of Gaza, the place where his mother is buried. Youness buys the olive valley and marries Fatima, daughter of the chief of Tuffa (a district of Gaza).

Cowrie makes a pilgrimage from New Zealand to Punalu’u, a Hawai’ian island where her grandfather once lived. She is welcomed by her extended family who live very simply and well on this bountiful island. Cowrie, who is a lesbian, revels in her family’s harmonious way of life, and begins to fall in love with Koana, a heterosexual woman.

Mary Bates, a young Australian living in London in the 1930s, is advised by Dr Gerald Somerset where to do her nursing training: ‘The London for hard work. St Mary’s for sport. Guy’s for flirts … and St Thomas’s for ladies,’ he says. Mary thinks Gerald would be as cold in bed as a dozen frozen eggs, but nevertheless she takes his advice and applies to St Thomas’s Hospital.

In 1960, Dr William McBride drew the world’s attention to the dangers of thalidomide. This drug had been found to cause multiple severe abnormalities in babies born to women who has taken it during early pregnancy. In 1961, thalidomide was withdrawn from sale in Australia, and McBride’s reputation grew as an authority on drug-induced birth defects. In 1971 he was awarded the inaugural BP Prize of the Institut de la Vie for his discovery. He used the prize money to establish Foundation 41, where he continued his research.

The white woman existed as story long before I chose to write of her and I can lay no more claim to her than can all of those who have spoken or written of her before. But no less either.

For the untutored Western reader this exuberant and clever novel about the histrionics of twentieth-century Indian politics invites comparison with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But this is a mistake. Tharoor covers similar territory to Rushdie, and gives voice to the same virulent distaste for the late Mrs Gandhi, but his book couldn’t be more different.

Reviewing Signals of Distress in the 11 Sept Guardian Weekly, Philip Hensher accuses Jim Crace of writing a ‘boy’s book’ in the meretricious style of a Golding feigning Conrad, and ending up all at sea.

Asked to write about the notion of being a New Woman, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s peroration, delivered by Pamela Rabe in A Room of One’s Own: ‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’

The general editor introduces the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia with a number of challenging statements. He does not want it to be ‘just another encyclopaedia’. He has made it his policy, he writes, to have no ‘academic-style text references, linguists and other students of Aboriginal studies rarely appear, and there are no “studies suggest that” ... This encyclopaedia also aims to tum the usual convention on its head by presenting an Australia with no white people except as they impinge on Aboriginal society.’

Are you a regional writer?

I suppose I am, if your definition of a regional writer is someone who evokes atmosphere and themes which have a particular relevance for a region. Firstly, to take the most obvious thing there has always been a particular buccaneering business style, dating from the days of the goldrush of the 1890s and in various eras since, and the whole 1980s materialistic era was written even larger on the West Coast than other places. Going even further back in historical terms when you think of the peculiarities of the exploration of this coast, both by the French and the Dutch, that is something which distinguishes the West Coast. Because of my particular enthusiasm for history and research and canvassing matters of the early exploration, it is a theme which has found its way into three or four of my books.